ere Sam
sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a short,
strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about the room
in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking up one of
the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing, raised it
above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.

"A hell of a strike leader," he roared. "Look at this. Scab machines!

"Scab stenographers!" he said through his teeth. "Scab printing! Scab
everything!"

Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking
to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam's face.

"Scab leader!" he shouted, turning and facing the girls.

The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.

"He's winning for us," she said.

Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.

"Better lose than win a scab victory," he bellowed.

"Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?" he demanded, turning to
Sam.

He launched into a speech. "I have been watching this fellow, I know him.
He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the
capitalists."

Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket and
started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself in a
dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to convince
Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.

"Do not mind me," he said, "I am going."

He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted
the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading
to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.

"Go back," he said, handing her a roll of bills. "Carry on the work if you
can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in secret."

Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd standing
at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted stores. A
cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young man with a
brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had interviewed
him the day before.

"Did Harrigan trim you?" asked the young man, and then added, laughing,
"He told us he intended to throw you down stairs."

Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side street
and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.

"This is our dump," said the young man, pointing to a long low frame
building facing the side street. "Come in and let us have your story. It
should be a good one."

Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying on a
flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a little
wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The young man
with the beard explained Sam's identity, taking the sleeping man by the
shoulder and shaking him vigorously.

"Wake up, Skipper! There's a good story here!" he shouted. "The union has
thrown out the mail-order strike leader!"

The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.

"Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You've got some
brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It's against the laws of
Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from
Pittsburgh?" he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.

Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat
from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I've got to
get a drink."

The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in at
the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper
sloshed through it, splattering Sam's clothes and face. In the saloon at a
table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began
explaining.

"I've a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay
it," he said. "When I have a note coming due I always have no money and I
always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don't know how I do
it, but I always come out all right. It's a system--Now about this
strike." He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in and
out, laughing and drinking. At ten o'clock the proprietor locked the front
door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat down at the
table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of the French wine
from which the two men continued drinking.

"That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?" he said, turning to
Sam. "A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the typewriter
people and made them take away the machines."

When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and offered
to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who arose and
stood unsteadily on his feet.

"Do you mean to insult me?" he demanded indignantly, throwing a twenty-
dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only fourteen
dollars.

"I might as well wipe off the slate while you're flush," he observed,
winking at Sam.

The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his
pocket, and throwing them on the table.

"I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag," he said to Sam. "Do
one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to my
friend here."

Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper
editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words
unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation,
the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had
been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing
out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the
position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.

"These fellows at bottom care nothing for results," he wrote. "They are
not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are
thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear is
threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old things,
struggle, and hatred and defeat."

When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley to
the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud and
carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the editorial
from Sam's hands and read it.

"Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top," he said,
pounding Sam on the shoulder. "Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about
the strike." Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat under
his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the desk in
a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a broom in
his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with presses The
Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving a soiled towel
and with water dripping from his hair.

"Now for the day and the labours thereof," he said, grinning at Sam and
taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.

After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber shop
opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam's girl with
the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and in their
places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up and down.
Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again a well-
dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking girls
approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan, shaking his
fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she drove off. From
the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the crowd and laughed.

"Where is the new strike leader--the mail-order strike leader?" he called
to Frank.

With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of the
crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.

"Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!" yelled Frank, dancing up and
down on the sidewalk.

Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the street,
his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.

"I know something," The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder. "I
know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back into
her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your editorial.
She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You'll see." He ran off up
the street, shouting back over his shoulder, "Come over to the dump, I
want to see you again."

Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The Skipper
who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing furiously.
From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of red gin, and
after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off sheet after sheet
of loosely-written matter.

"I got her to sign the note," he called over his shoulder to Sam. "She was
furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him and
defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system. I
always get drunk and it always wins."

At ten o'clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man with
the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper asking
advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he wrote.

"Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead," The Skipper kept
bawling at them, working like mad.

At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came in.
Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man at
work at the desk.

"Well, speak up. This is no ladies' reception room. What do you fellows
want?" snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.

Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the
newspaper man read hurriedly.

"Will you use it?" asked Frank.

The Skipper laughed.

"Wouldn't change a word of it," he shouted. "Sure I'll use it. It's what I
wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me."

Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began
yelling into the room beyond.

"Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I've got that last lead."

Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked. To
Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.

"Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab
leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class," it began, and after this
followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences without
point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser and The
Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink slinger.

"I'll run the stuff and comment on it," declared The Skipper, handing Sam
what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to read the
article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and sympathising
with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost because of the
incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.

"Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat in
order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out of
the cause of labour," wrote The Skipper.

Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm raged.
It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and disgusted
at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short black pipe
and took his cap from a nail on the wall.

"I'm the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as
well," he declared. "Let's go have a drink."

After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the
edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to
drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he saw
the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.

"Where are you going?" he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence,
the snow falling upon his face.

"I'm going with you," said the girl. "You're the best and the strongest
man I've ever seen and I'm not going to let you get away. If you've got a
wife it don't matter. She isn't what she should be or you wouldn't be
walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you're crazy, but
I know better. I am going with you and I'm going to help you find what you
want."

Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and gave
it to him.

"I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars," she said.

They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his
arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his. Her
round breasts rose and fell.

"Anywhere you say. I'll be your servant if you ask it of me."

A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He
thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.

"You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones," he
told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the
board fence, her head buried in her arms.




CHAPTER V


One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in
Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or
loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be
a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at
the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam
found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he
had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more
reflective. Little things--a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man
mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child's
hand from the doorway of a farmhouse--had furnished him food for hours of
thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the nods, the
hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and women who
met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway several
middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner, were
eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd.

A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. "Waiting for some
one?" she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried,
uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men
upon the sidewalk.

"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.

She looked startled and then laughed.

"Why don't you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?"
she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are I
want to tell you that I've quit my husband."

"Why?" asked Sam.

She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.

"I guess you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you know Alf at all.
And I'm glad you don't. I've quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the
same, if he saw me out here hustling."

Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a
lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and
beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, "Hello,
Sport!"

Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the
eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the
lives of great numbers of people in the cities--of the men and women on
the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe marriage
had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in the
theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all modern
city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger stood
in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it earnestly and
purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women
wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than
once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and
actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of
the city he thought that he had got past being startled. "It is a quality
of our lives," he decided. "American men and women have not learned to be
clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean
plains."

He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other
cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his
lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.

"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from the
big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months.
Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger
in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself
and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the
building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"

"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of him.

Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he
wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice,
and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile
attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human
betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the
playing of baseball on Sunday.

As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in
league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as
something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague
charm.

"For me," he reflected, "there have been no Francois Villons or Sapphos in
the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only heart-
breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces and
torn, greasy finery."

He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he,
as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's
suggestion and had been helped by him--helped and frightened and made to
see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a
second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed
across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of "Nana's Brother," saying
with a smirk, "That's some sporty stuff." And he wondered what he should
have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the
bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.

In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which
he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep
sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon in
Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that
it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.

"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to a
street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy
poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets into all
modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd
stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the
cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in
village stores."

Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things
were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and
daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of
Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could
but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the
glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that
city and in every city he had known.

Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone
in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam's mind leaped back to those
first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had
left behind him in Caxton.

"You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than
that painter's son of Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced
vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk
and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with
able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a
thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the lips-that-touch-liquor-
shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was reserved for the lips
that did not invite."

He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men
of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself,
quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the
innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms.
Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to
himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for
daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A
glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed
there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.

Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city's streets,
he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.

He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted
questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained
unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they
walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the
windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and
cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place;
men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces;
sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.

He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms
and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the
golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town
laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He
also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that
lurked at the bottom of men's tales of the submerged world. He wanted his
golden girl. He was like the naive German lad in the South Water Street
warehouses who had once said to him--he was a frugal soul--"I would like
to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who will be my
mistress and not charge anything."

Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He
had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and
now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be
made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of
vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no
housecleaning days in the tenderloin?

During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this
matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the
scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent
social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had
thought of the man's talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In
towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come
laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them
would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of
depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table
might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.

Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued
his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his
mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude
that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to
him under the lights filled him with peace. "There is so much of life," he
thought, "it must come to some end."

Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the
faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the
faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which
the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get
a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring
pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, "Here
are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your
children."

In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar
counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman
clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to
wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.

Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he
muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a
hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm
furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and red
blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the
air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white
limbs, her cheeks, her hair."

For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of
the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the
power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in
the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the
story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.

In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and
New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the
artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long
street he thought that he did understand.

Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an
affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her
face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of
the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet-
like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He
remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage
with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both
man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong
hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office
building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the
marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser
had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.

On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman,
standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called
softly, and turning he went to her.

"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands,
"but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting
hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that
I won't get to thinking."

"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you done
that you don't want to think?"

Sam said nothing.

"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of a
cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.

Sam kept on walking.

"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy a
good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook
in the kitchen."

They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he
waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he
went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she
returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam
thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work
on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still
waiting.

"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.

They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean
washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms.
Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been
well cooked.

They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and
she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying
her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and
because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness
by the church door, had made an appeal.

She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not
defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's.
Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had
the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she sat
before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.

After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman
of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.

"Are you going to take me anywhere after this--after we leave here?" she
said.

"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."

"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like
this. It makes me feel clean."

For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town
in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his
mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told
of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which
made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her
and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her
father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long
Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good
housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden
back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five
and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.

The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy
and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the
garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with
thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had
married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the
house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her
life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and
the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature,
undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her
husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by
various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a
time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that
her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the
town.

"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me or
for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a level,
businesslike way.

When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had
taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her
savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to
work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her
hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a
small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine
man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a
gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to
be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was
seven dollars a week.

"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and there
was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the boy
lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly for
patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the
streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of
them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their hands. I
can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left
alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my husband. We
got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found
where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a
thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found
there wasn't anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried
doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and when it came to the test I
cared more about the boy than I did about myself--any woman would. I
thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.

"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me
I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away when he
touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won't
get any money.

"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work
off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love
to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the hard
part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and
over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these
others lying to me."

She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
sat looking into the fire.

"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She
couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or
out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all. All
evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn't
clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with what I
am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop
when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don't go
on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe
myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I
don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets."

The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped
by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another
room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices.
The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that
he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he
should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a
quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.

As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.

"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.

Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said,
"we'll go through with it as it stands."

"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell
you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to
go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."

As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing
as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved
her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a
feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in
the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he
lifted up his voice in the night.

"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt
and destroy?"




CHAPTER VI


One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of
his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill
at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned
the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country
and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and
had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.

He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The
spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring
mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his
experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through
the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call
of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him
with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet
at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man
of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle
Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket
into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the
haunts of his kind.

In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into
the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.

Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
the quiet elegance of the surroundings.

"Hello, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a
nunnery."

Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open
with astonishment.

"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after
month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he
observed.

Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.

"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but
that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York
run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go
back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"

Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him.
How satisfied and happy he looked.

"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.

"They are a rotten crew," Jackson assured him, "and I am taking a night
train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."

On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man
who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.

"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt
everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of
thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
until I die."

"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit
and continued westward with his new acquaintance.

For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big-
hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment
in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his lusty,
primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts,
elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam
took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking
black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a
fool to go.

After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of
a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went
on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes,
canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs
and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that
world.

Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the
Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her.
For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she
walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to
mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face
with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city
feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the
years.

In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and
almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his
hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with
Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got
into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town
laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in
the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town,
where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing
songs.

One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.

"Give me some money, rich man," she said.

Sam looked at her closely.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she
had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.

"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly,
"but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."

Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
taxicab drove back to his hotel.

After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a
kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did
not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a
return to business which he did not execute, and month after month
continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin
drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative,
calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the
back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain.
In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and
with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove
high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on
board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave
his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains,
sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing
country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months
he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a
large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only
to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of
another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's
hotel in the Illinois town.

From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way
of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his
native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by
little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking
nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.




BOOK IV


CHAPTER I


One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
thought he would do something for them.

"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my
money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting
them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."

At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an
attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed
about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked
up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.

In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.

"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take
us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
costs."

It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went
among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on
the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.

"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
companions.

A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck
before the shouting crowd.

"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."

The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at
him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck
or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a
queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him
and he raised his hand for silence.

"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a
woman who has borne children."

A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group
gathered about the dancer.

"I have borne children--three of them," she said, laughing up into his
face. "I can bear more of them."

Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on
the deck. The crowd laughed.

"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a
tall woman with blue eyes.

As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs,
went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam
pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.

"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.

She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a
song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept time
with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood
looking up the river.

"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."

On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.

"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will show
you the kids."

Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam
her story.

She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.

"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay at
home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down
town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he would go
away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a man. He would
do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on
my hands."

In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an
open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.

"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.

They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where
children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them,
holding to the back of the carriage.

The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
the running boys.

"Run, you little devils," she cried.

They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the
lights.

"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given
it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp. The two
boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.

Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking
Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing,
alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and
dropped it down the neck of the driver.

In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam's head
was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over
the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all
effort burned in him.

"It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth," he thought. "He comes to a
fine end in life."

On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed
through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke
in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated
woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He
began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the
steamer.

"I have borne three children and can bear more."

His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him. He
thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life
unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and
direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.

"Else why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing
face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the
seat in front. "Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about
seeking Truth?"

His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
hand.

"Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
been," he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
thought, was being tossed about by life.

Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped. Through
the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar
drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads
throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came
out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
shouted. "O Will, come out here."

A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to his
elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.

"Will you run it?" he asked.

"Sure," she said. "The kids can take care of themselves."

At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out
of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting
a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled mass of
bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the
grey body of the river showed faint and far away. The undergrowth was so
thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here
and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight.

Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses
facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam's
arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door and into a
long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up
to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked
into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor
 and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three
children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at
the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face
and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes,
was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and black
eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him so that
his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow
hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another chair, her head
hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would have said, seven,
the black-haired boy ten.

The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the
sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy
straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.

"Hello, Mother," he said heartily.

The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.

"Come here, Joe," she said.

The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed she
struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling
into the dining-room.

"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you kids to
wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
and nothing done and you two reading books again."

The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
winced and twisted in his grasp.

"You come with me," he said.

He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily
on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.

At the top of the stairway he stopped.

"We go in here," she said, pointing to a door.

He took her into the room. "You get to sleep," he said, and going out
closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.

Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the
table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.

Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at
him self-consciously.

"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting
for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. "Let Tom do it," he
said. "I will help you here."

Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
dry wiping towels. Sam's coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.

The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam's
breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash
of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories
began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother
at work among other people's soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home
drunk, and the chill in his mother's heart and in his own. There was
something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood
but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of
fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.

In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam's spirit. The boy Joe went
quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves. Somewhere
on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the
hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the
hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life.
Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted
quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is
a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep
within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become
so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with
him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through
his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and
planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had
brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain
then ever.

The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
escape the shy silent presence of the boy. "Has life quite gone from me?
Am I but a dead thing walking about?" he asked himself. The presence of
the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?

The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys
said good night to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe, the
bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it
solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.

"I'll be around here to-morrow I think," Sam said huskily.

The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a new
journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day when
he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for Truth, he let
his mind go so that it played freely over his past life, reviewing and
analysing.

For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where the
lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted good on
his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought back to him
the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had given him
herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.

It was two o'clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and that
the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past like
living things upon the floor.

Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with
sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.

"Mother! O Mother!" called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could hear
the little body moving restlessly in bed.

Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed to
him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for hours
been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing for
which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in the
corridor of the hospital.

In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her shoes
and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool
morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened doors as
he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them sat at the
table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His tongue was
heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange questioning
eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.

For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had gone
away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the porch
outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she went to
sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly and
sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw the
country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came into
his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the tears but
evidence of self pity? He wondered.

One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too went
up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
awkwardly.

Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
the couch. "I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now," he
said to himself.

When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car and
went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft cashed.
Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and buying
clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night clothes, and
books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All these things he had
sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there to pack the trunks and
suit cases, and get them to the station. A large, motherly-looking woman,
an employe of the hotel, who passed through the hall, offered to help with
the packing.

After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to the
house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large bills.
He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the past.

"I will see what it will do here," he thought.

In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked at
him.

"There's a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Get me a
drink. Why do you hang about here?"

Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.

"What was your husband like?" he asked.

"Who? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He stood
for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and went
away." She looked at Sam and laughed.

"I didn't care much for him," she added. "He couldn't make money enough
for a live woman."

Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.

"The children will be a bother, eh?" he said.

"I have an offer for the house," she said. "I wish I didn't have the kids.
They are a nuisance."

"I have been figuring that out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the East
who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like
to do something to help you. I might take them to her."

"In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away," she laughed, and took
another drink from the bottle.

Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.

"Get a neighbour in here to witness this," he said. "The woman will want
things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
puts it on her."

She looked at him suspiciously. "What's the graft? Who gets stuck for the
fares down east?"

Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.

"Sign here," he said, putting the paper before her. "Here is your
neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent."

The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
lay down again on the couch.

"If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed," she
declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the
moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an
advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life,
for purpose to come into his own life.

Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the
brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.

He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of
them.

At two o'clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the
boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer
--bound for Sue.




CHAPTER II


Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that
he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean
much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is
commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the
others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies
and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what
they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned
the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong
convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.

  "It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
    drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
    near to you."

The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
determination.

What is inscribed on it?

It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown
among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and
courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had
to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe
has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we
must build now, in a lifetime.

In our father's day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky,
and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and
mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was
conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls
the wolves still howl.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of
failure.

But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there.
It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England
roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at
him from the stars.

Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps
his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.

The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a
house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam's breast
there was a feeling of something alive, growing.

Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a little
inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and nervous.

Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to
the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and
Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the
front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her
hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure
almost boyish in its slenderness.

With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she
did ask.

"Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?" she
asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
children.

Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.

"They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep," he said,
as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him
three strange children were an everyday affair.

Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
and little Mary put her arms about Sam's neck and hid her face on his
shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue's
arms. "She will be your mother now," he said defiantly, not looking at
Sue.

       *       *       *       *       *

The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
very nobly by Sue.

There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on
that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into
her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic
act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and
the children had been installed in the house.

A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
regarding food for the children. "They will want bread and milk, and beds
must be found for them," she said, and then, although her mind was still
filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam's children by some
other woman, she took her plunge. "This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and
these are our three children," she announced to the puzzled and smiling
servant.

They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In
the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
"Don't bring lamps, a candle will do," Sue said, and she went to stand
near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of
breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense
of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at
home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. "There is a
barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,"
she said, smiling at them.

       *       *       *       *       *

A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue's house and a road
that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the
Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble
light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches
overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the
darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the
house.

He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for
possession of his person.

There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always
to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled
people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man
of achievement.

And then there was another personality, a quite different being
altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
walked before men.

What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing
within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his
place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had
tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.

It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
darkness.

He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had come.
There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis for love
and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse could be
carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and brought to
her.

A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling
before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was again afraid.
When he saw Sue's figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale, flashing thing,
coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to hide himself in
the darkness.

And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
perplexities.

He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within
him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. "Nothing but
boldness will answer now," he kept saying to himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came
to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and
stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.

Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. "I
have taken them and you, of course," she said, after he had stepped to her
and had put his arm about her waist. "My life alone hasn't turned out to
be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in
the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age.
What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own
children by some other woman, some woman you had found to take my place.
It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen."

They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue's command,
found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and
excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.

In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue's figure going
through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently
she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being
prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live
what was left of his life.

With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of
the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down
over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.

Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly
seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue,
ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together.
Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must
begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of
Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world.
They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.

To what end?

There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. "To shift the load to the
shoulders of children is cowardice," he whispered to himself.

An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to be
concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it, but
he stood still under the trees. "I cannot run away from life. I must face
it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love," he told
himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.

How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a bird
moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of leaves. The
darkness before and behind was a wall through which he must in some way
manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand before him, as
though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he moved out of the
grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into the house.

THE END




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